Showgirls and Womanhood
So I have a habit of watching bad movies and live tweeting as I go along. Usually my commentary ends there, but I think I have more to say about my most recent subject, Showgirls.
A round table article found in Film Quarterly on JSTOR presents many different takes on the film. The authors try to unpack Showgirls through the lens of trash or cult cinema, attempting to analyze the film as a serious text, even though most admit the film is terrible. Sometimes, though, we can learn the most about ourselves through the products of our culture that we deem to be the worst. As this film came out in 1995, I’m not going to try to historicize it in my analysis. I was only 10 years old, and all I remember about the movie’s debut was trying to reconcile the Saved by the Bell reruns I watched with this snark that was circulating about poor Jessie Spano.
What I do want to do, however, is share briefly my thoughts on women and power in this movie. It’s no secret that this movie was a deliberate exploration of the sexual power of women. Nomi, he main character, is presented as a bad ass chick who no one should fuck with, but all of the power she has in the film is physical, be it sexual power (which is most of the time) or when she’s quite literally kicking ass. There’s no in-between for Nomi – it’s either fight or fuck.
All the power women have in this film comes from their overt sexuality. Nomi’s sometimes rival, Crystal, loses her power when her body is physically damaged, which also renders her sexual power inert. On the flip side, Nomi not only dances her way to the top, she fucks her way to the top, and orchestrates Crystal’s downfall by pushing her down the stairs. She is the agent who damages Crystal’s sexual power in order to bolster her own.
So what does this sexual power tell us? Should we celebrate this film as a triumphant unleashing of women’s sexuality, or is it simply softcore porn working to stroke the patriarchal male ego? All the positions of power are, after all, fulfilled and guarded by men in this film, and the way Nomi gains her power is partially through fulfilling the sexual fantasies of the men around her through lap dances or actual sex.
There’s also the troubling subject of rape in this film. One character who has no control in the film at all is Nomi’s African American roommate portrayed throughout the film as asexual and, as noted in the round table discussion, fulfilling a service role. When her character attempts to become sexualized, she is punished by being gang raped. Like in real life, no one calls the police on her attackers, in large part due to the fact that one of them is a famous pop star. Even though the film presents the act as wrong, it doesn’t right the wrong by seeing legal recourse.
The narrative is further problematized when Nomi enacts a rape revenge fantasy, literally kicking the shit out of Nomi’s most famous attacker. Here again we see female power being demonstrated through physical prowess, but the troubling nature of the rape itself, which could play like a fantasy in its own right, overshadows Nomi’s actions, leaving them as more problematic than cathartic.
At the end of the day it’s hard to read this film as any sort of liberation for women in general or for the women in it. Some of the authors in the round table discussion argue that Showgirls is purposeful camp, that Jessie Spano’s overacting is mean to embody Nomi’s over the top character. It’s hard to find agency for Nomi outside her sexuality, which leaves her to be rather one dimensional, and the patriarchy reins supreme as men take up positions of power and dictate things like whether or not someone can report a brutal rape to the police. Nomi and the women around her are more trapped in the system by their sexuality than liberated.
In any case, Showgirls is an interesting, if sometimes baffling watch. It’s a difficult film to unpack, and I don’t know if I agree that it was purposefully campy. But then again, it’s hard to discount the theory that the director didn’t know he was making a film so over the top.
